Electronic messaging, such as text messaging, has become increasing popular over the past few decades. Indeed, many users prefer using text messaging over voice communications. Text messaging is a method of communicating short messages between various types of client devices using Short Message Service (SMS) or Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) protocols. Messages sent via SMS are limited to 160 characters in length. MMS messages may contain longer strings of text, as well as photo, audio, or video data. Messages sent over both protocols are commonly referred to as “text messages” or “texts.”
Because SMS messages are limited to 160 characters in length, users have developed shorthand conventions for expressing common sentiments in such messages, such as “LOL” (“laughing out loud”), “IMO” (“in my opinion”), “OIC” (“oh I see), and many others. Although MMS messages do not share the same length limitation, such messages typically are similarly brief due to a variety of factors, including user convention, device interface considerations, historical technological limitations, and bandwidth concerns. Thus, these shorthand conventions are common in text messages sent both by SMS and by MMS.
Some of these common abbreviations are known as emoticons. Emoticons use text characters to depict certain emotions, usually as representations of facial expressions. For example, probably the most common emoticon is a “smiley face,” typically drawn as two or three characters: “:)” or “:-)”. Other common emoticons include “;)” (a wink), “:D” (an extra-large or open-mouthed smile), and “:P” (tongue sticking out). Emoticons allow text users to express complex emotions using very few characters, conserving available space in text messages and reducing typing requirements.
Another type of symbol used in text messages are emoji characters, which can also be referred to more succinctly as emoji. Emoji are small digital images or icons that are used to express things, ideas, emotions, etc., in electronic communication. A very popular use of emoji are in text messages that are sent from one mobile device (e.g., a smart phone) to another. Some such emoji are static images, while others may be animated.
Text messages are typically limited to including Unicode Standard characters. The Unicode Standard, which is maintained by the Unicode Technical Committee, is a character coding system designed to support the worldwide interchange, processing, and display of the written texts of the diverse languages and technical disciplines of the modern world. In addition, it supports classical and historical texts of many written languages. The latest version of the Unicode Standard is Version 9.0.0, which supports a total of 128,172 characters, was released in June 2016. Those Unicode Standard characters include, inter alia, alphabetical characters (that can be used alone, or strung together to make words), numerical characters (that can be used alone, or strung together to represent larger numbers), and emoji characters. Alphabetical characters and numerical characters, alone or in combination, can be referred to more generally as alphanumeric text.
One drawback of available emoji being limited to those included in the Unicode Standard is that users are unable to customize the images they send to express any sentiment beyond those already provided by the Unicode Standard. Moreover, the set of emoji included in the Unicode Standard may be particularly limited compared to the various thoughts that a user may wish to express in a text message. Further, emoji and/or other standard characters may look different on different client devices, depending upon the model of the client device and the operating system version being run on the client device.